Nowadays it is not unusual to development teams to use a Virtual Machine our even Docker to make a complete development available.

You should ask them if they have something like that: you will probably use more space than you would like to (specially if their solution is a VM), but at least you will not have to worry about setting up the environment.

If you don't want to use the Apache/mod_perl, you might be able to deal with part of their code (the ones that aren't directly related to mod_perl), but you will be severely limited depending on how their code is structured. mod_perl is very coupled with Apache for obvious reasons.

Finally, at least in a Unix-like OS, you should be able to install Apache + mod_perl very easily. If you have Linux, I bet you will find an image for Docker with Apache + mod_perl already setup!